1. The survey by Leonard, Forster, The Poet’s Tongues : Multilingualism in Literature (Cambridge, 1970)Google Scholar, does not contain specific mention of Nabokov.

2. Strong claims about the creative consequences of Nabokov's multilingual experience are made by George Steiner, in “Extraterritorial,” TriQuarterly, 17 (Winter 1970) : 123, who writes : “I have no hesitation in arguing that this poly-linguistic matrix is the determining fact of Nabokov's life and art, or, as Field more aptly phrases it, ‘life in art.' … the multi-lingual, cross-linguistic situation is both the matter and form of Nabokov's work (the two are, no doubt, inseparable and Pale Fire is the parable of their fusion).“ Steiner also raises the question of the nature of the multilingual imagination, “the possible existence of a private mixed idiom ‘beneath, ’ ‘coming before’ the localization of different languages in the articulate brain. Like Borges … Nabokov is a writer who seems to me to work very near the intricate threshold of syntax; he experiences linguistic forms in a state of manifold potentiality and, moving across vernaculars, is able to keep words and phrases in a charged, unstable mode of vitality.” These conjectures suggestively resemble certain untested hypotheses of modern psycholinguistics, but are beyond the purview of this paper.

3. Nabokov's linguistic invention (i.e., his “hybridization of tongues“), and the ironic, parodic, and ludic aspects of his multilingualism, are the subject of a separate paper.

4. The Annotated Lolita (New York, 1970), pp. xix and lix-lx.

5. For a concise typology of realism see Roman, Jakobson, “O khudozhestvennom realizme” (1921), Readings in Russian Poetics, Michigan Slavic Materials, vol. 2 (Ann Arbor, 1962), pp. 30–36 Google Scholar; and Texte der russischen Formalisten, vol. 1, ed. Jurij Striedter (Munich, 1969), pp. 372-91.

6. Cf. the treatment of bilingualism in War and Peace in chapter 3 of Vinogradov, V, “O iazyke Tolstogo,” Literaturnoe nasledstvo, 35-36 (1939) : 117–220Google Scholar.

7. The page number before the slash refers to the Henry Holt and Company edition of Bend Sinister (1947); the number after the slash, to the Time Reading Program Special Edition (1964). The glosses set off by quotation marks are by the author of this paper; those enclosed in square brackets are Nabokov's own and are so punctuated in the text of the novel.

8. French-Russian diglossia (the use of two or more languages within the same society) in prerevolutionary (especially early nineteenth-century) Russia was limited to the upper classes—the nobility and bureaucratic aristocracy. As such, it had a dual function—social and expressive. The use of French was, per se, a label of social class. At this point, however, I am concerned with the in-group expressive functions of diglossia. Vinogradov describes Tolstoy's view of French speech (in its use by Russian high society and by Frenchmen as well) as being artificial, contrived, vapid, and insincere. By contrast, Russian speech in War and Peace is (in particular passages) presented as simple, direct, and honest (see “O iazyke Tolstogo,” pp. 150-S8).

9. Viewed from outside the novel, the grocer's grotesque behavior is indeed a parody of a child, an authorial parody. This passage is one of the links between the author and his characters that Nabokov has so carefully placed throughout the novel. We know that Nabokov has elsewhere commented on Russian being his real voice. We also know that Nabokov has a son, Dmitry, who at the time of the writing of this novel was around eleven years old, had been David Krug’s age only a few years before, and, as a European child, very likely played “train.“

10. I have been unable to compare these translations with Nabokov’s translations from Hamlet, which were published in 1930 in the émigré newspaper Rul'. According to Field’s bibliography, these included the soliloquy of act 3, scene 1, and the speech from act 4, scene 3, but not act 3, scene 2.

11. The approximate text of this song, probably dating from the Civil War, is, “Ekh, iablochko, /Kudy kotishsia?/V vecheka popadesh'/Ne vorotish'sia” (“Hey, little apple, whither are you rolling? If the cheka gets you, you won’t return“).

12. Relatively little has been done in the study of bilingualism that bears on the question of language and affect, although it seems to be a commonplace that “one can be angrier or sadder in one's mother tongue.” See Ervin-Tripp, Susan, “Structure and Process of Language Acquisition,” Report of the Twenty-first Annual Round Table Meeting on Linguistics and Language Studies : Bilingualism and Language Contact (Washington, D.C. : Georgetown University, 1970), pp. 331–32Google Scholar. Clinical psychiatric evidence suggests that traumatic past experiences and personality conflict may be evoked in only one of a (coordinate) bilingual’s languages. See A. Richard Diebold, Jr., “The Consequences of Early Bilingualism in Cognitive Development and Personality Formation,” in Edward Norbeck et al., eds., The Study of Personality : An Interdisciplinary Appraisal (New York, 1968), p. 237. John Gumperz documents cases of switching into Spanish by English- Spanish bilinguals under conditions of increased emotional arousal. See his “Verbal Strategies in Multilingual Communication,” Report of the Twenty-first Annual Round Table Meeting, pp. 129-47. Nabokov’s involvement with Russian as a writer of course goes well beyond the ordinary speaker's affective associations (see, for example, the last paragraph of his 1956 afterword to Lolita). But the particular affective uses of Russian in Bend Sinister may reflect a common aspect of linguistic differentiation of bilinguals.